(Michael in the kitchen of the old monastery shed where the Lake Shrine Temple now stands in Pacific Palisades, California)
Thirty-three years ago today, on April 30th, 1991, I suspended my modestly thriving fifteen-year career as an actor to work for seven dollars an hour as a vegetarian cook in a monastery. The previous summer I had received initiation into Kriya Yoga on my 33rd birthday at the Mother Center headquarters of Self-Realization Fellowship, putting an end to seven years of procrastination about committing to a path that I knew was mine to follow. Today the two thirty-threes add up to an age that I am scarcely able to believe. I look in the mirror (an occupational hazard if you ever made your living in the theater) and have to confess to myself that although I still feel no older than 35 at most, I am looking at a man who (though still not at all bad-looking in my coldly professional assessment) will not be mistaken for less than 60. And somehow the 33rd anniversary of my three-and-a-half year immersion in the monastery environment is an unignorable fact, a moment to be marked, a day which insists that I give a meaning to it.
As with life itself, these moments have only the meaning we give them. That’s a classic existentialist statement, of course - the “existence precedes essence” dictum which posits that life has no inherent, innate meaning and is only endowed with purpose when we choose to define it. And while I am not an existentialist, strictly speaking, I have seen that we can energize a powerful healing or regenerative dynamic in our lives when we choose to step back from the distracting stress of this day and the next to take the long view of a lifetime, mark our progress, face our backslides, and choose (as Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan observed) to win the final victory of a sage - the refusal to accept the diminishments of age, but to live in the fullest possible vitality to the last breath. And we gain some power, I suspect, over these diminishments when we mark an epoch, a cylce in our lives, and ignite, if we can, a fresh new impulse for the years ahead.
If you choose to do this, it will be helpful (so I’ve found) to infuse the date with greater meaning through the power of story, to seek out the arc of beginning-middle-end, and, yes, the sheer entertainment value that may still be awaiting discovery if you allow yourself the time to muse upon it.
For example, there is a good story (to me, a very good story) in how I came to be hired in the first place as the ashram cook at the wondrously beautiful and serene meditation gardens of the SRF Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades. The power of the story anchors the date, makes it unforgettable, and inspires me still - as does the photo above of me in my bad monastic haircut, incipient gray hair, and trusting expression.
In the wake of my initiation into Kriya Yoga, I had moved to Los Angeles from my native Chicago with the encouragement of my wife (who remained behind, engrossed in her thriving therapist practice) for what was supposed to be at most a six-month campaign to capitalize on being signed by an LA talent agent during “pilot season” - the late winter to early spring season in which new TV shows were casting. Juilliard-trained, New York-seasoned, and Chicago-born, I was in my prime as an actor and it seemed to make sense to go for “the big time.”
(An epochal side note: I drove out from Chicago on my California adventure in a blizzard on January 5th, 1991. Exactly 25 years later on the same date, I drove back to the Midwest in the wake of my parents’ passing to spend a year assessing the epoch and starting anew. And January 5th just happens to be the birthday of my Guru, the renowned yoga master, Paramahansa Yogananda.).
Doors opened as soon as I arrived in LA. I found an apartment on the grounds of the SRF Temple on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, began to attend meditations, and was blessed to receive counsel from a direct disciple of Yogananda, the blissful and saintly Brother Bhaktananda. And, of course, still being an actor, I got new LA headshots, and commenced to “work the relationship” with my agent. And as I had only brought modest savings with me, I needed a side job.
So it was that in mid-April of that year I found myself lost in the Hollywood Hills as a courier - this in the days when faxes were still fairly new, the web an exotic innovation largely unused, cell phones (let alone smart phones) unheard of, PDFs non-existent - and hence the entertainment industry still needed drivers to hand-deliver hard copy scripts all over Southern California. Thus I divided my time between meditation and frying my brain for 40 hours a week in LA traffic, with a stack of undelivered packages on the seat and a 300-page Thomas Guide (the precursor to GPS) on my lap.
In the Hollywood Hills, the reclusive and exclusive hideaways on Mulholland Drive do not advertise their driveways or their addresses in the ordinary, middle-class fashion. A half-hidden plank obscured by a shrub may hold five or six illegible addresses on it. Lovely if you seek privacy - insanity-provoking if you seek to deliver a package - particularly if your profit margin dwindles with every mile lost to fruitless meanderings. All the while, of course, attempting to keep a silent river of devotion flowing peacefully through your mind.
To be brief, I lost it.
A passerby would have witnessed a 1988 blue Dodge Daytona pulled over in the dust, with a lone man in the front seat (nearly obscured by a stack of undelivered boxes) screaming highly colorful language while gesticulating wildly toward the heavens.
The screams comprised a kind of prayer. I was addressing God in very emphatic language. It went something like this: “*%#&! If You don’t give me a &#$! job where I can practice your *&%$ presence, I’m going to...I’m going to...well, I don’t know what the &^%$ I’ll do, but You’d better help me here, G--d----t!”
It was, you see, a sincere prayer. Deep, passionate, and very sincere.
And so, of course, an answer was given.
The dream held no light, or bliss. Joy, yes, but of a gentle sort. That night I dreamed I was visiting the Mother Center ashram where Yogananda had once lived. I walked into the main building, and there was the Reverend Mother of the Order, the revered Sri Daya Mata, sitting in a large chair, doing some knitting. She looked up and saw me, and smiled warmly. She gestured me to come a little closer, and then said in a kind of conspiratorial whisper, “I’ve said a prayer for you!”
(Sri Daya Mata, direct disciple of Yogananda, Reverend Mother of the SRF Monastic Order).
I smiled with surprised joy and pronamed to her. Then I turned to find Brother Bhaktananda standing to one side. He too leaned in confidentially and whispered, “Consider yourself employed!”
(Brother Bhaktananda, direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda)
I did not often dream of saints and so I woke with the dream still vivid in my mind. The meaning was a bit obscure, but the joy of it lingered.
It might have been that day, or the day after. On my daily post-courier stagger towards the meditation chapel, I saw a notice posted on the community bulletin board: “Wanted: Male Vegetarian Cook or young man willing to learn.” Little paper strips with a phone number clung to the notice, with no other indication of the employer. Young I still was, willing I certainly was, a cook I was not (though I had flipped burgers in a theater bar in NY). I took a strip with the phone number, and decided to give it a try.
The job was in the monastery. Within a week the Reverend Mother herself was signing my paycheck. And the kitchen where I was to work was located in a lakeside meditation garden world-famed for its peace and beauty, a place of such powerful sanctity that few can visit it unchanged, which would become my spiritual home for the next twenty-five years.
(The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, founded in 1950 by Paramahansa Yogananda)
If I couldn’t practice the presence of Divine Mother there (She may have reasoned), I was probably on the wrong planet.
There is one more such story of a date and an epoch to tell - an tale of mystic numbers, dying falls, an agonizing life choice, a pilgrimage to Assisi, and a dream of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” I will leave that for another post.
In the meantime, I encourage you to be with, feel into, and respect these dates, these harbingers, these synchronistic messages from within and beyond. For though we are, as the poet says, such stuff as dreams are made on and our little lives rounded with a sleep, still we can choose to dream lucidly, to brood and seek and dwell and finally to extract resurgent meaning from these markers in our lives.
blessings,
Michael